1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method using Sound Units (blendable letter sounds) and a combination of wheels to teach children or adults to quickly learn to read (decode) and write (encode) in English. The same wheels can also be used to help children master basic math skills and other important abilities.
2. Brief Description of the Prior Art
To learn to read, children have to be able to do both decoding (reading) and encoding (writing). In decoding, children have to understand what each combination of letters in a word represents so as to understand what that word is. In encoding, children have to be able to use the same combination of letters to formulate words so as to communicate their meaning to others.
There are problems in both encoding and decoding in the current methods used to teach reading. In decoding, after children have learned letter sounds in English, they have to use their learned letter sounds to decode words. In teaching children to use letter sounds to decode words, one critical problem remains unresolved, resulting in over 30% of children having difficulty in learning to read. That is how to help every child learn to blend letter sounds together efficiently and accurately without causing such a high percentage of children experiencing learning difficulties.
This problem is reflected in publications and books which address the problem. Under the title of xe2x80x9cEducators Still Disagree on How to Teach Reading (May 11, 1997), a New York Times reporter wrote: xe2x80x9cWhen 15,000 reading teachers and education professors gathered last week against the backdrop of the increasingly politicized debate over reading instruction, there was little consensus about the crucial issue of the best way to teach children to read.xe2x80x9d xe2x80x9cFor the most part, though, the hundreds of seminars and lectures offered last week focused on how reading teachers could do their jobs better. Virtually all the presentations drew standing-room-only audiences, underscoring the fact that 40 percent of the nation""s third-graders cannot read independently and that no educator has quite figured out how to solve the problem.xe2x80x9d
In xe2x80x9c30 Years of Research: What We Now Know About How Children Learn to Readxe2x80x9d by Bonita Grossen, a research associate with The National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators, the author gives this instruction on how to help children learn to decode words: xe2x80x9cAfter children have learned two or three sound-spelling correspondences, begin teaching them how to blend the sounds into words. Show them how to move sequentially from left to right through spellings as they xe2x80x98sound out,xe2x80x99 or say the sound for each spelling.xe2x80x9d
The disclosed system overcomes the problems with the prior art approaches. First, a basic distinction between blendable and unblendable letter sounds is not made among teachers and professionalsxe2x80x94a key step in deciding the failure and success of virtually every child in their efforts to learn to read. Children are just given the ambiguous instruction to blend all letter sounds together in order to decode a word rather than being taught which letter sounds are blendable and which ones are not. Without this knowledge, children are left by themselves to figure that out. Those who can go on learning to read with great success, those who cannot get stuck at the mercy relying on sight words to survive.
Second, it is extremely inefficient to decode words by xe2x80x9csaying the sound for each spellingxe2x80x9d, especially when it comes to multi-syllable words. It simply overwhelms children""s short-term memory by saying the sound of each spelling.
Third, a weakness in xe2x80x9csaying the sound for each spellingxe2x80x9d in order to decode a word is that it does not sound like a word when trying to say each sound. That is why so many teachers complain that even though their children have learned phonics they still cannot read words.
In encoding, a major difficulty for beginning learners, especially very young children, is the limited development of their motor skills in handling pens, pencils or even keyboards. Thus, they are deprived of many opportunities and experiences in manipulating letters to explore the vast and complex structures of the language. Without such opportunities and experiences, the time they need to understand and master the structure and formation of words is greatly extended.
Solving these two problemsxe2x80x94blending letter sounds together effectively and efficiently to decode words and giving children the ability to easily and efficiently encode wordsxe2x80x94will have a tremendous impact on their abilities to learn to read.
The disclosed system teaches the use of sound units which have successfully solved the most difficult part of readingxe2x80x94the blending of letter sounds in decoding words. Further, the system teaches the use of a combination of wheels to help children encode words easily and efficiently before their motor skills catch up. The same combination of wheels can also be used to teach basic math skills including adding, deducting, multiplying, and subdividing.
The use of sound units to decode words comprises three major steps. Children are taught how to distinguish between blendable and unblendable letter sounds. They are then taught how to blend the blendable letter sounds into sound units. Finally, children are taught how to add beginning and ending consonants to sound units to decode or encode words.
The word wheels disclosed herein provide a physical means for children to create words. Each Word wheel has three to five wheels with letters on each wheel. A child can create thousands of single syllable and multi-syllable words by simply turning each wheel.
The math wheels disclosed herein provide a physical means for children to solve basic math problems. Each Math wheel has three wheels with numbers on each one. A child can solve each problem by turning the wheels. The sorting wheels disclosed herein provide a physical means for children to sort and categorize shapes, letters, numbers, animals, plants, people, and many other things into different groups according to their internal and external features and characteristics.